‘Black Widow’ Movie: Marvel Has Met With Over 5 Dozen Directors

Spoilers, spoiler, spoilers. Do not proceed further if you haven’t seen Marvel’s “Avengers: Infinity War” like three times and have processed your grief.

Marvel week continues and if you’re not sick of us yet, here’s more (yes, we’re hoping it dies down soon too, but Cannes is on the way!). Worried about whether Black Widow, Scarlett Johansson makes it out alive at the end of “Avengers 4?” Don’t worry, a solo “Black Widow” movie is coming* (*unless it’s a prequel, then all bets are off). Marvel recently put “Black Widow” into development and hired a screenwriter Jac Schaeffer, who wrote “The Hustle,” a “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” remake starring Anne Hathaway and another project for the star, a Blacklist script called, “The Shower” (clearly Hathaway likes her work).

But the latest revelation on the film is that Marvel is being extremely thorough and has met with over 60 directors for the gig, which means presumably more than just female filmmakers (given that there’s sadly probably fewer than 60 active female directors in Hollywood right now [ed. note, of course’s there’s more. this is supposed to be a, “god, the numbers are dire our there” lament  that I guess didn’t go over].

What percentage is female? Or POCs? All of that info is unknown, but it was recently revealed that Marvel has met with three directors: Deniz Gamze Erguven (“Mustang”), Chloe Zhao (“The Rider”) and Amma Asante (“A United Kingdom”). So now you know three of 65-something filmmakers. That really narrows it down.

What would a “Black Widow” movie entail? Well, there’s been talk of the film as a prequel, detailing how Natasha Romanoff became a Russian spy and then eventually defected to the U.S. in what might be a very “Red Sparrow“-esque story (and given that movie’s already been made, one suspects the canny Marvel would not want to retread similar ground). Some of Black Widow’s Russian Spy-training days were briefly explored in Joss Whedon‘s “Avengers: Age of Ultron” where it was revealed she, and all the other Russian spies she trained with, were basically sterilized. “It makes everything easier,” she said in the movie. “Even killing” (more f*cked up is the fact that Johansson was pregnant during the time of filming).

One theory is using “Black Widow” as a team-up film since the character is arguably smaller than some of the more epic heroes and supporting characters could make it more enticing like the way ‘Winter Soldier’ also featured Falcon, Widow and Agent 13.

Team-ups are something Kevin Feige recently teased too. “I think ‘Ragnarok is a great example of a team-up, not just Hulk and Thor, but Loki and Korg, and … Hela, of course, but Valkyrie,” he told IGN this week. “There are a lot of great characters we wanna bring to the screen, not all of them will have their own movies. Not all of them can have sequels, for one reason or another, Hulk being most apparent. So putting them in other movies was sort of an experiment for us with ‘Ragnarok.'”

It’s also a bit of speculation on my part, but I could easily see Hawkeye showing up in a Black Widow movie unless a) Jeremy Renner’s contract is expired (seems like that might be true) or b) he takes out Thanos himself in ‘Avengers 4’ and then bigger things are in store for him. 😉

Either way, it seems like a “Black Widow” movie is eventually on the way and that would only be a good thing for dozens of reasons, none of the least of which being it’s nice to have females on screen leading their own movies.